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Do you use Twitter? Did you know you can easily and automatically post updates from your blog to Twitter? You can with Twitterfeed, a free service that takes any feed or feeds you specify, and publishes them to your Twitter account, as if you were posting the updates yourself.

When I start following someone on Twitter and it turns out that all they ever post about are their own blog updates, I quickly unfollow. I’m going to Twitter for the conversation, not for feeds. But, that’s not necessarily how everyone else thinks. Some people have actually requested that I include a feed in my Twitter posts. So, for them I’ve created a new Twitter account, just for the updates to my blog. Very convenient.

I'm probably the last to discover this, but FeedBurner has a “Twit This!” feed flare for your posts and feeds. By using the flare, readers can easily add your post to a Twitter message.

If you burn your feed with FeedBurner, open the account page for your blog. Go to the Optimize tab, then FeedFlare, then at the bottom of the page, “Browse the Catalog” and scroll down to “Twit This!”. Click on “link”, and copy the URL that appears in your navigation bar. It should look like this:

Return to your FeedBurner Optimize page, and paste this URL into the box to the left of “Add new flare.” Click the button, and Twit this! will appear in the list above, under the heading “Personal FeedFlare.” Be sure to click the boxes for Feed and Site, if you want the flare to appear in both locations.

Scroll down to the preview boxes, and slide Twit This! into the order in which you'd like it to appear on your feed and on your site.

If you use Blogger for your blog, you can now add a “Blog List” to the sidebar of your blog to keep track of the latest posts from your favorite sites. Like a blogroll, but better in that you can get a the title of the blog, the title of the most recent post, and an excerpt from the post, with the most recently updated blogs showing up at the top of the list. To use this feature in Blogger, you have to be using the most recent version of Blogger for your blog.

If you don’t have a Blogger blog, you can still use the feature by creating a Blogger blog just for the Blog List, and then pulling it into your blog using an iframe tag. I’m doing this now with the Food Blog Updates on Simply Recipes.